Burning Sands

Before the catastrophic BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico there was the man-made oil disaster in the Persian Gulf — over 700 oil wells were set on fire by Saddam Hussein. It was predicted it would take decades to extinguish them.

Burning Sands is the true story of the heroic men of a Calgary well-control company who set a world record in killing 126 of those wild wells in just five months and helping save the planet from the toxic smoke and fallout that threatened the earth and all of us.

Burning Sands

By Frank Touby

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Frank Touby

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Preamble: What The Hell Am I Doing Here?

Hot crude oil covers me. I taste it. I breathe it. It’s in my ears. I feel it running down the crack in my ass. More keeps coming at me. I’m standing with my feet stuck in oily mud the consistency of bread dough holding determinedly with a greasy grip to a ten-foot long steel rod with a T at my end so I can grasp it. It is pulling back and winning. At the other end it is attached to a pipe dangling from a crane and I am trying, along with Shoey Shoemaker who is on the other side with another steel rod, to pull that pipe into a screaming geyser of crude oil blasting at supersonic speed out of the ground.

It seems like a hopeless assignment, even though I’ve seen the guys do it a number of times before. It is never easy. On top of the rubble from what used to be a coke pile surrounding Sabriyeh Oil Well Number 7, or SA7 as it is called, stands crew chief Laurie Reno, also covered in oil and directing Shoey and me and the crane operator. The well is so loud I can’t hear a word he is yelling. My ears are also full of oil and that doesn’t help. Each time we pull the stinger pipe into the oil stream it directs the spray all around and I can only see so long as the oil stays out of my eyes. Once it’s in my eyes I’m done. There is no clean part of me to use to wipe it out and it’s so thick I won’t be able to see through it. So long as I keep my head angled down, my wide brimmed hard hat deflects the oil spray away from my eyes but right into my nose and mouth and ears. My beard is heavy with crude oil.

By taking off my hard hat and holding it in front of me, I can shield my face from the oil and look up to the left to see Laurie’s hand signals. But that means I only have one hand on the rod, which is trying to rip free, and I’m getting Laurie’s message a fraction later than Shoey, who seems to have a telepathic link with Laurie. I can’t figure out which way to pull to bring the stinger into proper position over the wellhead so oil will rush up through it and the crane can push its tapered tip down into the well.

I have to see where the tip is in relation to the wellhead. I lift my head slightly for just a peek. Just a quick, orienting, peek. I can’t see anything and my face feels warmer. My hard hat blows off. I’m standing blind, with crude oil in my eyes, the steel rod yanking at my arms and my full face exposed to the oil spray. I open my mouth to breathe but there is oil in it. I’m afraid to let go of the rod and as long as I hold it my face is directly in the path of the flow.

I feel like I’m going to drown. I can’t run or even turn away because my feet are cemented in the mud. I know this is the most dangerous part of the well-control operation. This is when the well could reignite and if it does I’m a living torch, unable to get away. If it happens now I can’t even see it, not that it would really mean anything in terms of my survival chances, which are nil. That thought burrows to the forefront of my growing anxiety. My camera, hanging from my neck and covered with plastic baggies, bounces against my belly, blown by the oil spray.

I’m a journalist, for chrissake! What the hell am I doing here? Why can’t I see?

I feel an arm on me and a strong grip taking the steel rod from me. Let me give you a hand, says Madd Mike Maddison in a voice loud enough to be heard over the din. He sounds calm and amused, which is how he always sounds. Then Ron McMahan and Stu Mattey are on either side of me, lifting me out of the mud and helping me walk through it away from the screams of SA7.

As we move away from the well I am no longer afraid I will burn up if the well reignites. I know with each step we are getting farther away from SA7 and they are capable of lifting me and running if the whoosh of a reignition should come. I am starting to feel silly, being led blind and helpless like a wounded soldier away from the scene of action. But I’m not wounded and I haven’t contributed to the action. I’m feeling silly because I am even here. I’m fifty-two years old, I’ve been a journalist for three-fifths of that and I have never before even seen an oil well except in pictures. What the hell am I doing here?

Chapter 1: The Eagle Flies In

Mike Miller is at Calgary International Airport on April 6, 1991. It is Saturday and about the last time until the project is completed that he will care what day of the week it is. The previous day with everything ready to go, the monstrous C-5 got its wing tips caught between two airport light posts and after being extracted from that, blew a tire. There is an atmosphere of pride and expectation crossed with anticlimax; the plane should have been gone a day before. There are several hundred well-wishers at the airport because, with the aid of his superb public relations man Brian McCutcheon, most of Calgary are aware their own are flying off to make history and clear the air over Kuwait. Many in the crowd were there the previous day when the C-5 had its run in with the light pole and the tire trouble. Then the news media reported the delay and that brought even more spectators out for what turned out to be the real departure.

Brian McCutcheon had also ensured that all the Safety Boss gear had new, bold logos on them. I was moved to tears, Mike writes in his diary, to see all that red iron with the Safety Boss name lined up for departure. Mike is feeling good all around. He has the first two payments totaling US$1.7 million, or seventy five percent of the money he is to be paid in advance for expenses. Still outstanding is $300,000 US owed by Kuwait as an advance on services, but he's not worried about getting it. Receiving the money is the real start, Mike writes in his diary.

This is the second time Mike has flown from Canada to do a blowout in a foreign land. He thinks back on that 1988 experience in Iran and how fulfilled he felt when it was over: I had such a thrill finally achieving the world stage for blowouts. That's how blowout companies like to see it: a stage.

It had taken months of nit-picking preparation and financial risk that could have sunk what little of his company was still above the pecuniary waterline, but forty-seven-year-old Mike Miller was at long last in the air with his beloved fire trucks and brave, strong men. It was the kind of flight Miller would have enjoyed even if it wasn't taking him to his idea of the best place in the world to be: hell on earth. For one thing it was on a C-5 transport plane, and an equipment-junkie like Mike Miller would rather be flying a freight train than a luxury Lear jet every day of the year. Despite their massive cargo holds, Miller and his gear filled two of those warehouses on wings.

In the bellies of those beasts were Mike's beloved fire trucks. He had wanted his own fire trucks since he was twelve years old, working for his father, Smokey, the founder of Mike's company. It was Smokey who gave the firm its unusual name, Safety Boss. In his straightforward manner, Smokey picked the name because the he had bought a batch of equipment that bore the label Fire Boss. His company would eke out a living by providing equipment and expertise at oil well sites in case of fire or deadly sour gas. His fire truck was more in line with what you'd expect to see in the oilpatch and nothing like what Mike would later buy; nothing like these kid's dream red Peterbilt treasures winging their way to Kuwait and the oilfires set by Saddam Hussein.

Mike wanted fire trucks complete with sirens and flashing lights. Not that you need flashing lights at a wellfire, not that deep in the bush where wells are drilled you are going to get there by dashing through traffic lights and stop signs with your siren screaming and your lights ablaze. But flash is part of Mike's make-up. He'd been a flashy dresser and a flashy athlete in high school. Mike has faith in those fire trucks, as he has faith in any good piece of engineering or heavy-duty equipment. And he wants fire trucks that look like fire trucks.

His fire trucks have powerful engines, forceful and quick-responding pumpers, and the best men he can assemble to operate them. They look out of place in the oilfield, where equipment is less distinguished in appearance. When gear is liable to be coated in tar and crude oil or even burnt to a tangle of tin, most owners forego appearances. Mike Miller would roll in his preened red machines and subject them to the worst the oilfield could dish out, and later relish the hours spent helping his crews remove the gunk, repair and re-bend the damaged parts, and polish the fire trucks back to their original red lustre.

Mike Miller values looking sharp and he also thinks it is sharp-looking to be coated in grease and soot and sweat, part of his muscular body showing through recent rips in his coveralls or fireproof jumpsuit. Sharp looking, that is, when he is occupied with a strenuous task in, on or around a wellhead or piece of heavy machinery.

Mike Miller is a man of action, which is not to say he's a man devoid of philosophy. He knows practically none of the jargon and says he's guided by a desire to avoid doing to those under him what he would not want done to him. He is as much as anything a result of negative reinforcement by his father, Kenneth Smokey Miller. Those who have observed him making plans say Mike takes a long look at what he wants, determines whether it's possible, calculates and guesstimates his chances and then proceeds with vigour. Positive thinking helps him compete in the areas he can't control; he makes allowances for Acts of God and behaves with singular consideration toward all.

The leadership skill needed in the devastated oilfields of Kuwait is called generalship. It is the most complicated form of leadership because it requires overall strategic ability and foregoes leadership by example, which Mike finds easy. He is a brave, skilled and energetic man who has no difficulty saying, Follow me! But generalship doesn't permit him that indulgence in vigourous activity to attack a task and soothe his mind with direct action. For a man of action it is achingly frustrating to stand aside and let others attempt the vital jobs you know you could yourself do; yet it is necessary. Generalship means being most skillful at delegation. It means not only selecting the Follow me! leaders, but developing them and constantly monitoring and encouraging them. Generalship seems passive to those who thrive on action, yet a general is indispensable.

For people in any sort of emergency services business, someone else's tragedy is payday. It just can't be any other way than that and about that Mike is philosophical: I feel the same way a doctor does when he gets a sick patient who's going to need a lot of expensive work. I'm happy for the work but I'm not happy someone had to get sick or hurt for it. I'm sure the doctor feels the great happiness I feel when the patient is cured, although my cure ratio is probably better than a doctor's since I put out the fires and cap the wells and things are ready to go again. The doctor may never get the patient back on his feet. The doctor has a tougher job and so does the municipal firefighter because they both save lives. When we save lives in this line of work, it's usually our own lives or the lives of our support hands. If the job is done properly, life-saving should never have to come into it. For Mike Miller and the men who bear the BOS (blowout specialist) label in their portfolios, catastrophe is what they both welcome and dread. Blowout specialists live on that edge where the biggest conceivable mess and conflagration means months of work at hundreds of dollars a day.

In Kuwait because of distance, hardship and extreme danger, it could mean years of work at a thousand dollars a day for some; tax-free lucre in Kuwait and in Canada because of a special tax provision exempting foreign oil-industry earnings abroad. It could be a bonanza; if the Kuwaitis pay, and that is not a certainty in Mike's mind. Dealing in the Arab world, he has been told, is not like doing business in Europe, Asia or North America, where deals are honoured most of the time. Mike has never dealt with the Kuwaitis, but is wary because of his experiences in Iran in 1988 where he wasn't paid what had been promised. So that has made him wary, as have the many tales he has heard from his colleagues in the oil business who dealt in the Middle East and found that prices and remunerations might be too easily altered after a Westerner thinks the deal is solid.

One of Mike's leadership tests will be to ensure his suppliers and his men receive their pay and that he, too, waddles away with his pockets bulging. It is perhaps his last chance for a big score. He has always struggled for a living, though he often made decent money in his chosen work. But not now. Not with the Canadian oilpatch in a depression which could last for decades. This ungodly event in Kuwait has the potential to pluck him from the continual threat of penury and enrich him for the rest of his life. It isn't like winning the lottery, though. First he must wade through hellfire and negotiate with and cajole scores of bureaucrats, suppliers, support crews and technocrats. Then he must collect his money.

Before Saddam blew the oil wells — while it was still just a threat on his lips — Mike sat in on endless and costly meetings in Houston as Kuwait government representatives negotiated with him and the Houston companies about the contract. He flew back and forth at his own cost, which was the least of the expenses he had to foot to negotiate the deal. He ignored everything else and assigned his staff to drop everything and prepare the necessary reports he took back and forth to Houston. He made their paycheques and kept paying his bills with no money coming in. He estimates he spent thousands of hours of planning and hundreds of hours in contract negotiations without even knowing whether the wells would really be blown. His legal bill alone ran thirty-five thousand dollars. Obviously we would have had a very difficult time had no blowouts occurred, he says.

The biggest test posed by the Kuwait oilfires for Mike Miller was not to his cash collection abilities or to his oilfield knowledge or his technical expertise. It was to his leadership abilities. For the kind of money they were to receive, and for the chance to become a part of history, the best were readily available. His crews were mainly formed with men who had proven abilities and a minimum ten years of oilfield experience. Some had not been involved in blowout work per se, but still had oilpatch backgrounds. A few were relatives Mike agreed to give a chance, while a few others were individuals who had succeeded in impressing Mike. He has learned by experience how to judge men and, in that formality-scoffing attitude of Canadian Westerners, overlooked what many would have viewed as deficiencies in their curricula vitae. Mike will take a chance on a man he feels has character traits that would benefit the operation.

That decade of experience they had in the oilpatch means Mike was dealing with men who had the brainpower and the educational equivalent to a technical university degree. That sounds like an outrageous comparison, especially when some of the grammar and syntax of those men could be topped by a literate fifth grader, but it isn't. In the deadly and complicated radius where they practise their skills and knowledge, they are PhD level.

In all joint human endeavours, leadership is as critical as the skills, character and motivations of the personnel. However knowledgeable and expert men may be in their fields, they can't function without direction, inspiration and the timely arrival of needed tools and supplies. Some may be able to draw from inner reserves of strength or will and excel despite poor or enigmatic leadership, lack of proper equipment and hostile human and natural environments. None, though, can operate in such leadership vacuums for the possible numbers of years it was thought might be required to quench the wellfires of Kuwait.

With inspiring and respectful leadership, good men could overcome many supply limitations and unique situations by innovating. With caring and careful leadership, they would face extraordinary degrees of physical danger with equanimity. Mike knows this well. He's had the example of his father, Smokey, which he used all his life as a paradigm of how not to lead. Smokey is a legend in the Alberta oilpatch. He'd handle blowouts and fires that started occasionally during the drilling process, when most wellfires occur.

Smokey was an autocrat. He leaned hard on his men and he leaned hard on young Mike. While Smokey was alive, Mike partly detested him and traces of that harsh view of his father remain even during the Kuwait project. Whatever Smokey's faults were, those who knew them both said Mike was a tough guy who got his toughness from his dad and though Mike wouldn't recognize it, his strong sense of fairness as well. They also say Smokey wasn't as big a bastard as Mike felt. In Mike's view, Smokey seldom got the best from his men because his acerbic temperament discouraged competence and encouraged sycophants. He had never developed workers who could function on their own, says Mike, because he demanded obedience and fealty. In the view of his son, Smokey would prefer to gratify some itch in himself to harangue and abuse the incompetent than to deal with those who had independent abilities.

When I bought the company from my dad, he had a few people still working for him and I told them I would try to keep them on. But I made it clear I would demand they put out and do good work. I think they figured because they knew me as Smokey's son that I would be as easy going as they knew me to be. But easy going doesn't mean I'm going to get walked on, and I think that compared to my dad they thought I was a soft touch. I tried to keep them on, but it just wasn't working out so eventually I had to let them all go, said Mike.

His easy-going nature is well known. He is also a go-getter and strongly determined in any pursuit. His father moved the family around Alberta and Mike attended a number of schools. He was athletic; quarterbacking a couple of high school football teams and was active in basketball. He was also a bit of a dandy, say some who remember him then. Mike was a snappy dresser and liked to be seen in expensive cars. His love of equipment endured from his early teens when he fell in love with his father's utilitarian fire truck and pledged to have his own some day. But his would be those big, shiny machines he dubbed Smokey in honour of his dad and shipped to Kuwait; those machines that would make the Texans snort with laughter in the beginning — but only in the beginning.

In Kuwait Mike's leadership style comes to be compared less with that of a corporate executive and more with that of the generals who won the war with Saddam. Some men working for Santa Fe Drilling, a support company, will call him the Schwartzkopf of the oilfield, comparing him to the U.S. military leader General Norman Schwartzkopf. The nickname seems fitting, they say, because Mike is an inspirational but practical sort of leader who manages to take a multinational force victoriously across the blazing desert; just like Stormin' Norman. The Canadians working for Mike agree, though they would prefer to compare him to a Canadian hero.

The Alberta oilpatch has brought him both a living and the threat of bankruptcy since his teen years. During the tragic times for the petroleum industry in the 1980s, he and Safety Boss tottered on the brink of bankruptcy three times. He was close to it this time. Then he was contacted in late September 1990 by the exiled government of Kuwait which had been chased from its country by Iraqi invasion forces